C., who got me diving again after I stopped because she wanted to learn, doesn’t dive no more. The cold North Sea that bathes the shores of The Netherlands, the cold of the lakes I still dive is what made her stop. We think. But we also know that beyond the mere physical constrains, there is a greyness, a monotony in these waters, that is not for her.
And I understand, of course. Diving is a cumbersome occupation, diving is covering yourself in layers and layers of neoprene and cordura, is strapping your feet with clumsy copies of the elegant fins of them fishes, is covering your face with rubber and glass and finally, is strapping your sides with steel bottles and getting the air you need from a contraption in your mouth. You really have to like the simplicity of a dutch sandy bottom to go through the whole donning of that equipment. Perhaps you have to be as stupid as I am, as hooked by the depth as I have always been.
Or, perhaps, you have to see, to really see, what there is always there.
As a biologist knows, I know that crabs are scavengers. So I tend to believe that a landscape dominated by crabs is an empoverished environment. Actually I know that the shores of the Oosterschelde where we dive are empoverished. Empoverished by ourselves, by the never stopping cargo ships, by the relentless fishing, by our mere existence. So I go down and I see crabs, and I shrug and I try to search for other things, for the exotic and the uncommon. I even succeed, now and then. Earlier today a little sepiola, not bigger than my thumb, looked at me from her imperfect camouflage of sand, hoping to pass unnoticed.
But also, earlier today, I looked at the scissors of a crab. As I have looked at them thousands of times in these waters. Only this time I noticed that they are blue. They are as blue as a venezuelan sky can be, they are as blue as nothing in this north european country can be. They are as blue, I suppose, as many other things that live in these grey waters of ours, those things that I have looked at, but I haven’t seen.
And perhaps that is what the water tells me, again and again, when I dive. It is really worth to see.
If we can.